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Construction mishap causes Wi-Fi outage at SMC

On Saturday, Saint Mary’s campus had a major systems outage that started at approximately 8:40 a.m. when Internet fiber cables were cut downtown near Memorial Hospital.

According to an email sent to students on Sunday afternoon, during some construction a crew member cut through a large bundle of dark fiber that severed Internet service to many customers.

Repair began around 5:30 p.m. Saturday to splice the cables back together and service was restored around 12:15 p.m. Sunday.

Chief Information Officer Michael Boehm apologized for the inconvenience to students in an email after the outage.

Boehm said in the email, “We attempted to send out updates via email to our user community over the last 24 hours but due the Internet outage not all users got the updates.”

Senior Torie Otteson said she realized the Internet was out on Saturday morning before the game when she tried to download her ticket for the Navy game.

After the game, Otteson said she tried to work on midterm assignments but the outage hindered her ability to access readings on BlackBoard and research for two papers due next week.

“I would say I lost approximately 5 hours of work time,” she said.

Otteson said she understands that the Wi-Fi outage was out of the Saint Mary’s IT department’s control.

“I still wish they would have some sort of backup to help assuage issues like this in the future,” she said. “We live in the 21st century, and it is impossible now to do basically anything without Internet connection.”

According to an email sent to students, the department of information technology will continue to monitor the service over the next several days to ensure things continue to work as expected.